I know, to my generation, the 60s and 70s held this strange obsession for some of us. They looked like a worldwide high watermark of hippies, free love, acid, and anarchy. I’ve watched more than my fair share of documentaries on the 60s and the counterculture movement over the years. I’ve also read a lot of Hunter S Thompson, thanks to a youthful encounter with Terry Gilliam’s movie adaptation of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That movie was responsible for a lot of nights out with Thompson talking in my head. As a kid who grew up on the Marx Brothers, I could hear Groucho in that growl of a voice. Its fast, warped brilliance. The gonzo attitude to authority.
That interest in the San Francisco scene had made me aware of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test quite early on. It was held up by a lot of people as something pivotal. A Rosetta stone if you wanted to really decode the why and how of the acid scene.
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